


people are always asking me if I know Trevor Evans

by Bontaque



Category: Suits (TV)
Genre: AU, Fight Club AU
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2012-10-17
Updated: 2012-10-16
Packaged: 2017-11-16 11:47:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,897
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/539088
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bontaque/pseuds/Bontaque
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A Fight Club AU where Mike Ross is The Narrator, Trevor Evans is Tyler Durden and Jenny Griffith is Marla Singer.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Insomnia

**Author's Note:**

> Okay so this isn't even my idea, but I said I'd write it so here's the start. Inspired by [this post](http://justonepepsi.tumblr.com/post/32844531006) and [this absolutely stunning piece of fanart](http://spookbeta.tumblr.com/post/33146079597/we-have-sort-of-a-triangle-thing-going-on-here-i).
> 
> No sex or violence or much of anything yet, although I ship Mike/Trevor and Tyler/Narrator hard so it's been really hard not to make it about that.
> 
> Loosely based off of Fight Club in parts, less loosely in others. Based off of the FILM, not the book because I was too lazy to find my copy in my mass of books, whoops.

_For six months, I couldn't sleep. With insomnia, nothing's real. Everything's far away. Everything is a copy of a copy of a copy. When deep space exploration ramps up, it'll be the corporations that name everything. The IBM Stella Sphere. The Microsoft Galaxy. The Planet Red Bull._

_It's the corporations that we all need, that we rely on. I think I would have died without Red Bull. Not caffeine, Red Bull. I would have faded away or just stopped functioning._

 

Mike was sitting at his desk, spacing in or out or something in between when Louis walked up to him. Apparently they needed him to go out of town to meet an important client. Important to someone like Mike, not the firm, or they would have sent someone higher up than an associate.

“Here's your flight coupons,” Louis said, placing an envelope on his desk. “Call me from the road if anything goes wrong.”

The other associates watched Mike leave jealously. They'd all worked hard to get their jobs, stupidly hard, in fact and yet they all wanted to leave. Nobody wanted to be there, it was just mildly better than the alternative.

Like so many others, Mike had become a slave to the Ikea nesting idea. If he saw something clever, like a coffee table in the shape of a yin-yang, he had to have it.

It was a recent development. After years of living on as little as possible, sending every spare cent to his grandmother's care home, he finally had a good pay check. So he rented a bigger apartment. A bigger apartment that needed to be filled with things.

When you don't sleep, you have more hours in the day. More hours to flick through the never ending Ikea catalogue.

His doctor wasn't any help.

“No, you can't die from insomnia,” he said.

“Are you sure?” Mike asked. “Surely there's something you can give me?”

“You need healthy, natural sleep,” the doctor said. It was all he ever said. “Chew some valerian root and get more exercise.”

“Come on, please? I'm in pain.”

“You want to see pain?” the doctor asked, mildly annoyed. “Swing by a testicular cancer support group. That's pain.”

So that was how Mike ended up in a church on a Thursday evening, surrounded by crying men. They shared, he listened and he realised the doctor was right. They were in pain but that didn't mean he could sleep.

Then came the one to one sharing. He paired up and listened some more. When it was his time to share, he couldn't. He didn't have cancer. He'd never had cancer and he didn't feel right lying to someone who had. So instead, he got a hug.

It was the first hug he'd had in a long time and for some reason, he started to cry. He let go. He was lost in oblivion. Dark, silent and complete. He'd found freedom. Losing all hope was freedom.

For the first time in months, he slept. He slept better than he ever had.

He became addicted. More to the sleep, to having a normal life again than to the groups themselves, but they were the only way he could achieve what he needed.

It was his vacation. His resurrection. And she ruined everything.

“This is cancer, right?”

She was beautiful, there was no doubt about that but there was a broken quality to her. Like she'd fallen into another life and couldn't get back to where she was supposed to be. It could happen to anyone. It could have happened to Mike. Although, if he thought about it honestly, Mike thought he probably would have been happier if he'd been kicked out of law school early on. He wouldn't have needed to invent fake illnesses for himself just to get a decent night's sleep, at least.

Jenny... she looked like she should have been one of the happy ones. Not someone faking it in support groups. And yes, Mike could judge because she was smoking in a cancer support group. She was a woman, smoking, in a _testicular_ cancer support group. Even he wouldn't go that far.

Mike needed his lies. It was more than that. He didn't just need those strangers to believe him, he needed to believe it himself. But Jenny's lies reflected his lies. She was at every group. Cancer, the parasites, tuberculosis. He couldn't cry. So he couldn't sleep.

When you have insomnia, you're never really asleep. And you're never really awake.

It took Mike a week to call her out. It took him a week to need to talk to her, because he needed sleep, because he couldn't go back.

“You're a tourist,” he said, when he was sure nobody would overhear her. “You're faking.”

“So what?” she asked. “We're the same.”

So he explained, told her that he needed the groups. That he couldn't function without them. Apparently, it wasn't her problem.

“How about we split them?” Mike asked, clutching at straws.

So they did. They split the groups right down the middle. He got cancer, because they didn't like her smoking anyway, she got the parasites. They exchanged numbers, just in case. Because that was something that adults did.


	2. Single Serving Friends

 

_You wake up at SeaTac. SFO. LAX. You wake up at O'Hare. Dallas Fort Worth. BWI. Lose an hour. Gain an hour. This is your life and it's ending one minute at a time. If you wake up at a different time in a different place, could you wake up as a different person?_

 

Mike wasn't sure if he hated or loved flying. Everything was tiny, single serving. Everything had no meaning. The people he met, they were single serving friends. He spent hours just sitting, waiting, trying to fill the time. Nothing mattered in the air. But that was what made it a perfect escape.

“It's a lot of responsibility, isn't it?” a man asked.

Mike looked up, looked at the person sitting next to him. They were at the front of the row and Mike had the aisle seat. That meant this guy was sitting next to the emergency exit. He was looking over a card telling him that in the event of a crash, he would be responsible for making sure the door got opened.

“Uh, yeah,” Mike said.

“Wanna swap seats?” the other guy asked.

“...No,” Mike said. “I don't think I'm quite the man for the job.”

Mike didn't like silence. Not like this. When they were just sitting there, that was fine, but now that they had acknowledged each other, it was different. Once they'd spoken, they had to keep speaking.

“So, what do you do?” he asked.

“You don't have to act like you're interested.”

But he did. He really did. After a moment the guy answered. His face seemed to be set in an endless smirk.

“I make and sell soap,” he said.

Mike frowned as the man leant down and picked up his briefcase. At first glance, Mike thought he'd picked up the wrong one, but no, they just had identical cases. He flipped it open to reveal soap. Lot's of soap.

The business card he handed him told Mike his name. Trevor Evans.

“Did you know that if you mix gasoline and frozen orange juice you can make napalm?” Trevor asked as he put his case back on the floor.

“Can you?” Mike asked.

“Yeah, you can make all sorts of things with household items,” Trevor said.

Mike didn't quite know what to make of that. That it was the first thing Trevor thought of, whilst on a plane of all things. Well, he knew one thing.

“I think you're the most interesting single serving friend I've met,” he said.

“Single serving friend?” Trevor asked.

“Oh, uh, yeah, see... I have this thing. Everything on a plane is -”

“No, I get it. Everything's single serving. Clever.”

If any one else had said it, Mike would have been one hundred percent certain that they were being sarcastic. With Trevor, he was only around ninety percent sure.

How he came to live with Trevor... that was a little more complicated.

Airlines had this policy about vibrating luggage. Apparently ticking was fine, because modern bombs didn't actually tick. After an awkward conversation with a member of the airport staff who suggested that he may have had a sex toy in his suitcase, Mike left and decided just to go home.

Which would have been fine if his apartment and all of his belongings hadn't recently exploded all over the sidewalk. There were sirens and flashing lights and everyone looked at him as he stared at the mangled mess that was his life. Because that was what it was. His possessions had become him and there they were, burned and melted, cracked and broken, all over the streets of New York.

There was a single scrap of paper on top of his ruined coffee table. Somehow it had survived the fire.

So Mike walked to the nearest payphone and called Jenny Griffith.

She answered, of course she answered, but he didn't know what to say. He hung up.

She didn't owe him anything, except maybe some nights at his support groups. They shared nothing, they'd barely shared a conversation.

Then Mike remembered the business card. He didn't know why he called him.

He entered the number in slowly and this time he was disappointed for a different reason. Trevor didn't answer.

Mike sighed and tried to think of what he could do. His clothes, they'd been in his luggage, they were gone. Everything was gone.

Then the phone began to ring.

“Hello?” he asked.

“Who's this?” came a voice.

“Trevor?” Mike asked.

“Who _is_ this?” Trevor asked.

“We met on the plane,” Mike said. “The clever guy.”

So that was how Mike ended up in a bar with Trevor and that is half the story. They talked, mainly about Mike's life and how it had gone to shit in one day. Not that it wasn't shit already.

“That's the thing, you're trying too hard,” Trevor said. “Fuck that. Fuck needing all that stuff, it's not important. It doesn't make you happy.”

Mike knew he was right. It didn't. It didn't matter how expensive and comfortable his bed was, he still didn't sleep.

So he listened. He listened to the few words Trevor had as they drank and drank. Eventually it was last call so they left. Outside in the parking lot, Trevor lit up a cigarette. He offered one to Mike, who, on closer inspection realised Trevor wasn't just smoking tobacco.

“No,” he laughed. “I don't smoke.”

Trevor shrugged. He was the opposite to Mike in so many ways. The current Mike, at least. He hadn't always been this way. He'd been young and impressionable and lazy and it was only his need to fund his grandmother's health care and his lack of friends like Trevor that drove him to law school.

“I should find a hotel,” Mike said.

“Just ask me,” Trevor replied.

Mike frowned.

“What?”

“Cut the foreplay and just ask, man,” Trevor said.

Mike couldn't, could he? Sure, he'd mentioned the hotel on purpose, but he hadn't actually expected it to work.

“Can I stay at your place?” he asked.

“Yeah.”

It was as simple as that. Sure he could stay, because Trevor Evans didn't give a fuck.


End file.
